Switching whole hog to renewable energy at today’s level of electricity consumption is not possible for the United States, although I’ve heard people talk about it as if it were an attainable goal. At today’s rates of electricity consumption and generation, powering America using only hydropower would require fifty functioning Hoover Dams within each one of the fifty states of the Union. Powering America using only wind power would require more than one million wind turbines, or one every mile or so across the whole of the continental United States. As for solar energy, a land area the size of South Carolina would have to be sacrificed to solar panels in order to generate America’s annual diet of electricity. Entirely switching over to renewables at their present rate of efficiency is, unfortunately, a pipe dream.

— The Story of More by Hope Jahren